I'll Pray When I'm Dying Read online

  “Snoring.” Ben trying to grin. Couldn’t. Wiped his hands up and down his slacks and thighs.

  “What?”

  “I said snoring. Snoring, I said. She killed her husband because he snored. All the night through. Every night. For years. She should’ve pleaded temporary insanity; she’d still be alive today. Locked up tight but alive at least,” he said, picking a piece of white flint from his jacket sleeve. Squinting at it and blowing it from his fingertips.

  “Like I already said, crazy fucking spade got what she deserved,” the man shrugged and picked up his pint glass, examining the foamy contents collected at the bottom of it.

  “No, no, not particularly. I can understand her motives fully. Empathy, it’s important to have empathy in this life, you know? Every person you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about,” he said, tapping at his temple with a finger shaped like a pistol. “Imagine it, snoring every single night for years on end, it would drive any sane person completely looney, no?”

  “Yeah, right. Sure. Now, what’s your fucking point?”

  The snorting man drained the remaining bubbles of his beer and belched. Ben eyeballed him; his left eye twitched. He massaged it impatiently as he spoke. “My point is actually a question. The question being what exactly the fuck is that revolting snorting noise you keep making? I’m sat over here attempting to enjoy the peace and quiet of this here dim, little bar, shithole that it may be, reading the funny papers, or fucking trying to, and you continue to snort, snort, snort, snort, honk, honk, honk. Incessantly. You sound like a fucking disgusting pig. It’s quite maddening, I assure you. Knitting needle through the eye kind of maddening. Are you sharp enough to comprehend what I am trying to tell you, fuckhead?”

  “What’s it to you? I’ve gotta cold, so go fuck yourself, you limey fucking prick.”

  “I see. You’re the hardheaded type, are you? A hardcase? That’s a shame.”

  Ben reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and took out his detective’s badge, flashed it fleetingly at the man’s gawping sweat-stained face. The gold shimmered softly in the shadows and he placed it on the bar in the center of the neatly folded Boston Herald. Unclipped the .38 Smith and Wesson service revolver from the shoulder holster inside his jacket and placed it next to the badge. The symmetry was slightly off, he adjusted it. Readjusted it. Touched the newspaper. Touched the revolver. Counted to seven under his breath. Nodded to himself. Symmetry. Order. The guy at the other end of the bar stared, mouth gaping. When Ben felt better about the placements, the order of things, he slid off of his stool slowly, sighing like a man returning to work after a short lunch break. Went and leaned on the bar next to the man. Took a step back. Not too close. The man stank of congealed sweat. Congealed. Ben gagged. Swallowed. Slapped a fist to his mouth and nose. His skin burning, prickling. Festering. He scratched, scratched, scratched at his stomach and chest. Took another step back and tried to compose himself. Breathed slow. The man glared. Sneering.

  “A race traitor and a copper, huh? I should’ve known it. What? You gonna fucking arrest me for breathing too loud? Who the fuck do you think you are? I served my country in Europe. France. Lost a lot of buddies to the Krauts, so cowards like you could scurry around the streets free and clear hiding behind a badge. You can go fuck yourself, if you think I’m letting you slap cuffs on me because you don’t like the way I’m breathing over here. Now, lemme drink in peace you limey, powder poof fucking cop.”

  “Scurry?” Ben scratched at his jaw and moved down to his throat again, drawing blood from an old shaving cut. He winced. Frowning at the man. His face contorted into lines and creases.

  “What you say?”

  “No, no, no. You say. You said, ‘scurry around’. ‘Scurry’. That’s an exceedingly unkind word, isn’t it? I want you to tell me why you elected to use the word ‘scurry’? Of all of the words in the English language you could have chosen, and you decided on ‘scurry’. Why that word in particular? I want you to tell me. Tell me. Tell. Tell me. I want you to tell me.” The stuttering repetition, his sickness. When he was upset. Anxious. Disturbed. The compulsion to repeat certain things. To get them out of his mouth correctly. Sounding right. Ordered. A curse since childhood. Ben pinched at the flesh of his hand to break off the garbled words. Counting to seven in his head. Counting the lines in the construction fuckhead’s face. Twelve lines. He counted beads of sweat. Four. Four beads of sweat. Four was an unlucky number. He knocked on the wooden bar top. Touch wood. Knocking on wood stopped bad things from happening. Breathless. Pulse ratcheting. The oxygen seemingly sucked from the bar. His breath came ragged and short. He pulled at the knot in his plain, navy necktie.

  “What? What are you talking about? It’s just a word. You can’t arrest a working man, a veteran, for breathing too loud and the kinds of words he says,” the man glanced at Sammy the bartender as he spoke, trying to hook some kind of eye contact, some kind of moral support. The bartender sunk deeper into the back shelves, avoiding eye contact, and rubbing obscenely at a glass with the same rag he’d used to clean the surfaces. Ben dry heaved, glared back down at the man on the stool in front of him. Wiped sweat from his temples and eyes with a jacket sleeve. Inhaled deep.

  “No, no, no. You’re sadly mistaken. I’m not going to arrest you, friend. It’s gone past that point now, unfortunately. You escalated the situation. Escalated. The situation has escalated.”

  “You ain’t gonna arrest me? Then what the hell you crowding me for, you darkie loving, stuttering freak?”

  “I’m not going to arrest you,” Ben shook his head, faux sad. “No, not at all. I’m going to have to put you out of your misery because you sicken me. Sicken me. You literally make my skin crawl. You make my flesh scurry. That was the word you used, wasn’t it? ‘Scurry’? Like I’m some kind of a fucking insect? An ant? Or a fucking cockroach? Is that what I am? A cockroach? A bug?”

  The construction monkey laughed it up. The laughter a forced, unsure kind. Brittle and fragile in the sudden vacuum of the bar’s atmosphere. The bartender mumbled something about needing to take a piss, wiped his hands on the chest of his grimy apron and stumbled into the toilets, slamming the door behind him. The glass rattled sharply in its frame. The man chuckled uneasily again and twisted on his stool to size Ben up; a grin torn rigidly across his face like a flesh wound. Ben gagged again from the stale stink of the pig, winced, pulled his ‘drop gun’, another .38 with masking tape around the handle and the serial number scraped away, from the base of his spine, stabbed it into the man’s soft guts, pulled down on the trigger. The bullet thumped home with a muffled ‘POP’. The man pulled a ridiculous, shocked expression. Eyes and mouth stupidly wide. Breath stinking. Ben jumped back and shot him again in the chest as he collapsed from the stool, gasping. Sucking air.

  Ben preferred not to shoot people in the head because the impact of the bullet caused the blood to mist minutely into the air. Blowback. A toxic vapor. Diseases could be breathed into the lungs causing all kinds of infections. Diseases. The kind his mother had wasted away from. The chest less messy and safer. Cleaner. More sanitary. Especially in an enclosed area like a bar.

  “Scurry?! Scurry around?! Go ahead! Make that filthy fucking pig snorting noise again,” Ben panted, out of breath, at the man lying on the dark, chipped tiled flooring spreading a thick puddle of deep red. The man didn’t answer because he was dead. Eyes like beads of glass fixed unseeingly on Ben. Wide and white. Very different from the boy’s in the photograph.

  Ben wiped his sleeve across his mouth, paced in circles, gulped a mouthful of whiskey from the bottle on the bar, gargled it, spat it onto the ground. Exhaled loud. Pushed the lank blonde hair hanging in his face back over his head. Walked quickly around the back of the bar, opened the cash register and scattered dollar bills and loose change around the place like confetti. Counting aloud as he did. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Seven that lucky number. Wiped off the .38 with his handkerchief, placing it into the still warm
dead man’s hand and fired off a couple of shots at the bar doors. The oak paneling shattered and splintered. Someone let out a surprised scream from in between the rumbles of traffic outside. The bartender peered his bald head out from behind the restroom door, Ben wiped the hanging hair from his grey eyes again and tried to smile. To seem normal. Ordered.

  “Sammy, my good friend, this gentleman just tried to rob your drinking establishment while you were indisposed. Can you believe that? It’s a damn good thing I was here, wasn’t it? You should probably call some of my pals to come and clean up this mess though,” Ben said waving a hand towards the dead man. “You’ll have to close up shop for a while, too. Inconvenient, I know, I know, but these things can’t be helped any, can they?”

  “Jesus Christ, Ben! Why’d you have to go and do that again? I’m trying to run a fucking business here,” the barkeep stuttered.

  “Are you fucking deaf, Sammy? I just told you, he was trying to rob the place blind. Now, is there going to be a problem?” Ben picked up his service revolver from its resting place on the newspaper and span it on the oak bar top. The muzzle went round and round before finally settling on the barman. Ben shrugged and span it again.

  “No! No, there ain’t no problem of course. He was trying to rob the place. Sure. Whatever you say, Ben. I was just checking, is all. Getting the story straight.”

  “Well, what do you say?”

  “What?”

  “What do you say? I just saved your fucking livelihood, did I not?”

  “Oh, right. Sure. Thanks a lot, Ben. You saved my bar… Thanks a lot,” Samuel sighed. Wiped his forehead with the bar towel. “Who do I gotta call, anyway? Which pals of yours do I have to call this time? The Seven Shamrocks on Dorchester or the BPD?” he muttered staring at the dead man crumpled on the floor.

  Ben shrugged, “it doesn’t really matter, I suppose. The results will be the same, but probably the latter is best this time around, don’t you think, Samuel?” Ben twitched, went around to where he had been sitting, picked up the bottle of whisky from the bar top again and splashed the contents over his hands, rubbing them together. Cleansed. Sanitized. He then sat back down on his stool, replacing the slowly spinning revolver and detective’s shield back into the inside of his jacket as the bartender bitched and moaned into a telephone behind the bar. He flicked open the Boston Herald, drawn to the article about the missing boy again. An uncontrolled compulsion to all things unpleasant, another sign of his dysfunctions. He sighed deep. Feeling a little more relaxed about everything. A kind of peace at last. The voices resurrected from the photograph that flashed screeching through his head like raging house-fires faded to black. The silence of the place almost spiritual, a church from his childhood…

  His fucking childhood.

  No, he couldn’t relax. Too fucking itchy. The boy’s eyes in the newspaper still screaming at him. The ache boiling up in his guts, burning. The dark silhouette from his childhood scurrying through his mind unchained and free. The black shape at the end of a bed. Twitching. Ben’s left eyelid blinked uncontrollably. He placed a palm over it. Stood up. Hands grasping at the stool for support. Vertigo. His nostrils detecting the stench of shit radiating from the corpse at the other side of the bar. He cursed repeatedly under his breath, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  About to leave, he snatched up his hat then hesitated. Frowning, he ran his fingers through his hair, shoved on the fedora and ripped the photograph of the missing child from the newspaper. Folded it carefully into his pocket with the envelope of cash and staggered twitching into a chilled Boston afternoon. Sammy shouted something as the doors slammed shut. Ben ignored him.

  A group of pedestrians stood clustered on the sidewalk outside muttering hushed to each other. He was sure he’d seen the same crowd in a recent nightmare. No animal uglier, stupider or more vicious than a crowd. How he hated most people. His body ached suddenly. Sirens wailed in the distance. He pulled the brim of his fedora low, flashed his badge at the disgusting gawkers, told them everything was all right, to go back to their business. Thought about ripping the .38 from its shoulder holster and shooting blindly into the crowd, saving the last bullet for himself. The image of his own suicide something ingrained into him like a concentration camp tattoo since adolescence. The reason why he kept the rounds to the .38 in the glove compartment of his Cadillac when he finished working. He’d sat in his pitch-black apartment, pressing the empty revolver against his temple and pulling the trigger so many times he’d lost count.

  Click, click, click. Click, click, click. Click. Seven—a lucky number.

  He shook his head at the thoughts and walked down the block to where he had parked his automobile.

  Sitting in the Cadillac, listening to the engine. The newspaper page in his fingertips. Trying to catch his breath. Counting to seven.

  One.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Five.

  Six.

  Seven.

  London, England

  Thursday, February 18th, 1926

  Big Ben called out eleven times.

  Metropolitan Police Sergeant William Hughes counted the chimes, watching the couple. The two shadows that swayed and shook together. Darkness draped around their forms like funeral shrouds. A subway train rumbled underneath his heavily shined boots through the rain dampened cobblestones. A stony weight in his guts, a heaviness in his bollocks. A cool sweat freckling his brow. He watched them. The lovers. Writhing together like snakes in heat. A feminine laugh took flight into the night on papery wings and lingered along with the woman’s acrid perfume. A breathless, intoxicated conversation whispered hushed along the weathered, pockmarked bricks of the glue factory they were huddled against. He ran fingers over his thick mustache and breathed in the damp February night air. Lost in thought. Locked elsewhere for a transient moment.

  Paris, 1918. A woman’s smile in candlelight. A sigh. The taste of perfume on the slender nape of a neck. Long golden hair underneath his fingertips.

  Memories, a bloody, aching wound in the mouth to be tongued at.

  He nodded to himself, a decision made and slid the truncheon from the worn leather belt on his hip. Making his way over to the two slow dancing forms. The sounds of his heavy footfalls echoing off of the tenement walls. The woman’s face as pale as the moon gaped and hissed a curse in his direction.

  “Now, now, what the bloody hell’s going on here then?” the smiling policeman said.

  The young man startled, squeaking out a weak moan, fumbling at his trousers and jacket. Readjusting. Correcting himself.

  “Nothing at all, Constable. I’m sorry. I’m just escorting my lady friend home, that’s all.”

  “Sergeant.”

  “I beg ya pardon?”

  The policeman tapped at his upper arm, at the golden insignia sewn into the dark, rough fabric of his uniform jacket, with the heavy oak truncheon bringing their eyes to the rank patch but their focus stuck fixed to the cruel glimmer of the cosh in his large fist.

  “Ah, I see. Yes. Yes, of course, Sergeant. Sergeant. I am dreadfully sorry, Sergeant,” stuttered the boy.

  “This your lady friend then, is it?” the policeman asked, roughly running the truncheon over the woman’s hip and then up to her swollen breasts. Stabbing the nub of the truncheon hard into the place her nipple pushed through the thin fabric of the cheap dress. She pouted and rotated her leg on the heel of a muck covered shoe, turning away from the blunt object and closer into the young man.

  “Not much of a friend, nor much a lady neither, I suspect. And dressed pretty loosely for February weather too, I might add,” the police sergeant chuckled humorlessly.

  “Leave off, would ya, please Constable. We ain’t botherin’ nobody. Are we?” hissed the woman. Her breath reeking sweetly of poteen and bile. Something intoxicating, maddening about the stink of it that the policeman savored. Relished. He stared at the man, ignoring the woman,

  “Shut your trap a minute, woma
n. Males are talking. What’s your name, boy?”

  “George. George Gamble, Sir. I mean, I mean Sergeant.”

  “And where do you presently reside, boy?”

  “I… I…”

  “Cease the stuttering and answer the God-damned question, boy.”

  “I’m staying at a lodging house over on Commercial Street. Spitalfields.”

  “Yes, I know the street very well. A haven for degenerates. How old are you, boy?”

  “I’ll be twenty-three this coming November, Sergeant.”

  “Well, George Gamble who is twenty-three in November, your lady friend here is a brass. A tart. A Babylonian whore. A succubus. You know that fact, do you, boy? Soliciting a prostitute is a crime. A very serious one at that, I’ll add.”

  “Oh, leave off, for Christ’s sake,” the woman sighed. She sagged back against the pockmarked brick wall again, lit a cigarette from a dull tin tobacco case and flicked the spent match at the feet of the Sergeant. He felt his face burn up. Sunburnt and windswept raw. The little fucking whore was testing his resolve. His patience. He hadn’t even started in on her as of yet. The cunt. Cunt whore. Fucking cunt whore. Harlot. Betrayer. Betrayer. Betrayer.

  The policeman stepped forward; his fist snapping out a jab that sent the woman sprawling onto her back. Hard and heavy. Her long white dress spread over the glimmering cobblestones; her milky thighs illuminated in the moonlight. She looked so very beautiful, the policeman thought. Something to be destroyed. Wrecked. So achingly beautiful. Painful. He could smell lavender and red wine. A phonograph bleeding out music sadly. Paris on the night air. He shook his head to try and clear it.

  “You should retire and return to your residence now, boy, if you know what’s best for you. I’ll escort your lady friend home. No need for you to trouble yourself now,” he said, rubbing the knuckles of his fist with the hand still gripping the cosh.